


Love Beneath the Waxing Moon

by spinsterclaire



Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Diana Gabaldon, First Love, One Shot, Utter Shite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-30
Updated: 2016-04-30
Packaged: 2018-06-05 11:38:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6703162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spinsterclaire/pseuds/spinsterclaire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A one-shot featuring my headcanon for Claire's first experiences with love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love Beneath the Waxing Moon

**Author's Note:**

> A very random story, but I feel a bit guilty for not writing/posting lately, so...*throws crap at you*
> 
> Inspired by this Joseph Lorusso painting - http://pin.it/OvtmQEI - which popped up on my tumblr dash one day and got me thinking (for whatever reason).

Claire Beauchamp is fifteen when she finds him under a waxing Turkish moon. He is her Second Love— _Tomas—_ for the First came in the form of some scattered, broken bones two weeks before.

It was a June morning—an _average_ morning, until Claire’s hands struck something hard. She parted the sand, upturned the earth, and pulled her First Love from the belly of Old Mesopotamia. He was a boy of fourteen, buried deep inside a cave, and she cradled him in her arms like gold.

To celebrate, Uncle Lamb rolled two cigarettes (“A spectacular find, my dear! Marvelous!”), and they chased the smoke with jugs of bitter, bitter beer. Claire was unsure if the tobacco, the alcohol, or her uncle’s praise were at fault, but she fell in love with the dead and broken boy that day. Her First Discovery.

“What shall we call him?” Lamb asked.

“Evren,” she said. A Turkish word: _from the universe_.

After Lamb and the others fell asleep, Claire picked her way up the small, rocky hills. She passed the gnarled Sycamore and the rattlesnakes’ den, crawled over the lip of the crag and into the cave. Evren’s bones were still there, a half-formed body in the sand.

She told him about dinner ( _I’m really quite sick of rice_ ), about her uncle ( _You met him earlier, Ev, remember?_ ), and her parents ( _Did you meet them in the ground?_ ). She knew it was ridiculous, the whole business of having bones for a lover, the past for a future. But then Claire had always been “ridiculous” (ridiculous hair, ridiculous mouth), and she didn’t much care for outside opinions. She found faith and hope and destiny buried deep inside that cave. First Love born from a collection of ribs and broken vertebrae. A cracked and eyeless skull.

**~**

Claire meets her Second Love— _Tomas—_ in that very same cave, the waxing Turkish moon high above their heads. She whispers to Evren, though it’s Tomas’ voice that speaks from the eyeless skull.

“ _That_  one is Orion,” Claire tells her dead boy, “And if you look over there, you’ll see—”

“Gemini.”

Tomas is a student from Spain, and the youngest of Lamb’s team, save for Claire herself. He isn’t very tall and he isn’t very beautiful, but Claire watches him from time to time and likes the way he moves. He has firm, muscled arms and an arrogant tilt to his head, all nascent manhood and crooked smiles. His bright green eyes watch Claire too, peeking out from dark lashes when she walks by.

Tomas understands why Claire talks to skeletons, why a First Discovery becomes a First Love.

“But you must remember, _senorita_ ,” he tells her now, “You cannot find real love in a dead and broken thing.”

“That’s not true,” Claire replies, for she loves plenty of dead things. Evren for one, her parents for another—and she loves many that are broken too. There’s her geode from California, two rocky halves filled with purple crystals. And now there is Tomas’ chipped incisor, gleaming in the moonbeam.

“That’s because you have not been in real love.”

“So you think,” she retorts, though she wonders if he’s right. “I’m Claire, by the way.”

“I know who you are, _senorita_.”

**~**

There is no steeper cliff than love, and so Claire falls completely,  _ridiculously_ for the boy with the green eyes and the crooked smile. Claire and Tomas talk about the books she’s read, the places she’s been, how she once met a man who spoke nine languages (“And two were _extinct_!”). She tells him that she’s been a dead and broken thing since the age of five. That in the sweaty, barely-lit castle of canvas where they meet each night, Tomas heals her again and again, and her wounds no longer bleed.

“You seem very alive to me,” he says, pushing into her.

**~**

Tomas teaches Claire how to kiss and how to dance; how the human body has no god except itself.

“Sew yourself up,” Tomas tells her one day, her palm bleeding from thumb to pinky. “Put yourself back together again.”

Under his guidance, Claire learns to stitch flesh with needle and thread. She watches herself heal as the moon and her heart grow fuller, the wound turning from gash to scab to a tender stripe of pink. By July, the stitches are gone, and there is nothing there at all.

“See?” Tomas purrs, “Not so dead and broken after all.”

**~**

Tomas calls Claire  _mi pájaro_.

 _Mi pájaro_ because her hands fly over the sand, finding all the dead and broken things. 

 _Mi_   _pájaro_  because she is always in the clouds, a mind full of dreams.

“I can see the shores of America!” she likes to joke, looking out from the cave and to the world below.

Tomas has been to America _three_ times. He has seen the Wild West (“No. No cowboy’s, _mi pajoro_.”), the Grand Canyon, and the Empire State Building. In Claire’s dreams, the two of them are on an ocean liner, steaming across the Atlantic towards a shiny New York City. In Claire’s dreams, the wind does not make her hair ridiculous, and when the morning mists part, a silhouette looms ahead.

“My lady liberty,” she imagines Tomas whispering in her ear, “ _Mi_   _pájaro.”_

**~**

Sometimes Claire thinks the sands had blown like fairy dust, had turned Claire’s dead and broken boy to flesh and blood beneath the waxing moon. Tomas is the Second _and_ the First, Evren risen from the universe to come find her.

“Tomas,” Claire goads him, “do you prefer this second life to your first?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

“Because the first did not have you in it.”

Tomas plays Claire’s games like this, eager to please and be pleased in return. He likes the way it makes her generous, the way her kisses are easy when he pretends to be her skeleton boy.

“Tell me again how you found me,” she begs him.

“I heard your voice and rose up from the earth, like Lazarus.”

“So I’m Christ?”

“ _Si,_ ” He pulls her close. “I came from the earth and you came from the sky. Do you perform other miracles, too,  _mi pájaro_?”

“I think I could manage something…”

Claire prays to Tomas, and he prays to her until miracles echo through the soles of her feet. She will remember these moments in their barely-lit castle: the way Tomas holds her when they finish. The way his words are sweet, his kisses like fire. The way the days and weeks and months fly by, and she doesn’t care when the sun sets early, their time running out.

**~**

By September, the cave ground is empty. Evren’s bones are shipped away, and talk turns to Europe, to Africa, to places far from Turkey and from Tomas.

As the nights grow longer and the shadows lengthen, Claire notices the green eyes following the Turkish waitress. The crooked smiles are for her, too, and Claire hasn’t been to his tent in six days. He breaks his promises (“We’ll go somewhere tomorrow, _mi pájaro_ ), and his kisses die before they reach her lips. 

Claire does not dream of New York City but of needles and thread. Her palm opens and bleeds, but her fingers are clumsy. Her stitches never hold and her skin never heals.

**~**

It’s an evening in early October when their final night arrives—four months since the First, three since “I know who you are, _senorita_ ”.  Two weeks since the eyes and smiles and dreams were stolen from her.

Claire and Tomas dance together beneath a starless sky, swaying to the music and to the buzz of that bitter, bitter beer. She and Lamb will leave tomorrow and head West; board a great big boat, and set sail for Greece.

(Tomas will not come with her.)

When the song ends, Claire whispers three words into his shoulder—to rewind time, to stop time, to make more time, she doesn’t know—but Tomas does not say them back. His firm, muscled arms leave her waist, and those bright green eyes peek up from dark lashes.

“Oh,  _mi pájaro.”_

“Is it that girl?” she asks him later. “That waitress?”

“Oh,  _mi pájaro,”_ he says again. So full of pity.

Tomas does not take Claire back to his tent that night. He does not play along when she says maybe she can work a miracle this evening? Maybe she can turn back time to July? When the stars were out and the sand was like fairy dust around their hands and feet?

“Not tonight, Claire.” His hands are cold when he pats her shoulder, and he breaks away before she can stop him.

(Tomas will not be there when she leaves in the morning.)

**~**

Claire stumbles past the Sycamore and the rattlesnakes’ den, trips on the craggy rock and breaks open her knees. The cuts bleed and bleed— _Will they ever stop?_  —but she has her needles and thread, and she will put herself together again.

Inside the cave and on the emptied burial ground, Claire sews the torn flesh, keeps herself whole. The thread tangles and tears blur her vision, but she manages well enough under the waning Turkish moon. One wound for the First, the other for the Second.

 _These stitches will hold_ , she thinks. _My skin will heal_. _I will not be a dead and broken thing._

Inside the cave and on the emptied burial ground, Claire vows to sew the world up, keep it whole. She will fix and mend, stitch cuts and cure diseases. She will heal wounds until there is nothing there at all.

No pain, no scars.

No dead and broken things.


End file.
